The dying gaze

Описание: Over the centuries, Venice has intertwined its history with the development of specific techniques of adaptation and survival, from the great engineering works of diversion of watercourses to the small arts of everyday life. Sandbar, ghebi (little canals), islets and lidos give life to a fragile and extremely varied lagoon morphology where a complex and likewise fragile ecosystem can be found. As the Anthropology of landscape suggests, this is a transformed (scape, from the German scapjan/shaffen) land, the product of a complex cultural process (Lai, 2000). This means that, for better or for worse, the above mentioned anthropization has modified and continues to modify the hydro-geological balance of the Venetian Lagoon, impacting on its flora and fauna. In the light of above, the harvesting of moeche is an emblematic case. Moeche – which when fried may constitute one of the most typical dishes in Venice – are the littoral crabs fished during the carapace molting, which normally happens twice a year, in spring and autumn. During the molt period, the crab needs a specific environmental factors to change its carapace: the light of the moon, a certain water temperature, flat sea between tides; a very complex picture where climate change, the policies for the protection of traditional savoir-faire and tourism, with interrelated dynamics, influence the existence of this kind of fishing. The author of the documentary gives voice here to two actors: Luigi, an informal researcher and expert of fishing practices in the Lagoon, embodiment of an oral history telling an art that is dying and that will become soon one of the many mestieri de ‘na volta (ancient jobs) of Venice and its Lagoon; and Domenico, a moecante (fisherman of moeche), the youngest in the northern Lagoon, who at almost fifty years of age, he most of all, feels the weight of the end of such tradition.